By Sarah Jensen, Regional Food Systems Coordinator, FAN-NWO
Do you know how your food gets onto your table? How the carrots in your fridge go from seed to harvest to you? How your bacon gets raised or your honey gets harvested before it’s packaged and then put in your freezer or pantry?
You might already know the importance of eating locally – you may shop at our local farmers’ markets, or have a farm share box that you pick up from one of our local producers. Maybe you look for local ingredients at restaurants, or buy locally grown and produced products in the grocery store. However you do it, eating locally and in season is good for you, good for your community, good for the planet, and it tastes good too.
Eating seasonally has many benefits – it’s more nutritious and flavourful because it’s fresh; it likely didn’t have to be transported as far, or grown with excess energy and resources, making it more environmentally friendly; and it supports our local food economies – our local farmers, producers, processors, and food retailers can support their families and communities with support from you. In fact, buying more local, seasonal food “ would mean creating jobs, generating tax dollars, and having an impact on the wider economy” (Thunder Bay + Area Food Strategy: Community Food System Report Card, 2023) and, in Northwestern Ontario, every 1,000
jobs at local farms and food processors support 700 additional jobs indirectly among suppliers and retailers (The Workforce Multiplier Effect of Local Farms and Food Processors in Northwestern Ontario, 2013.)
If you want to know where to eat local, you can check out TbayInSeason, our guide to local food, with searchable listings of seasonal products, where to find them, how to contact vendors, and how to cook with what’s fresh and available.
Local, seasonal food is also a wonderful way to come together with friends, family, and community. At the Food Action Network of Northwestern Ontario, we’ve been attending events celebrating the best time of year for local eating: harvest season. In August, we held a seed event about the importance of creating locally sustainable crops like the watermelons we then sampled at the Hymers Fall Fair. In September, we co-hosted the Good Harvest Market, which saw dozens of local farmers and many of your friendly faces out enjoying the best of what harvest season in our region has to offer.
If you are looking for an incredible local food event to attend this month, join us at the Farm Hall Dinner on October 18th. This celebratory, harvest season event, co-hosted by Goods & Co. and Belluz Farms, will feature many local farmers’ foods, and support and promote our local food producers through local food availability/seasonality education. The proceeds from this event will go to community access work at Belluz Farms, and support the work of the United Way and the Food Action Network of Northwestern Ontario.
Aakash Rathod, of Creative Cooking, will be the head chef at the Farm Hall Dinner.
He spoke about the importance of eating locally and seasonally, saying: “Harvest season has been celebrated all around the world for a long time, and we are fortunate enough to have such an event annually. We should be celebrating this event as much as we can, and the best way to do it is to put it on a plate and share it with people.”
This harvest season, we hope you will join us at our table and share in eating local, seasonal goodness.
To get tickets to the Farm Hall Dinner, visit: belluzfarms.on.ca/belluz-farm-hall-dinner
If you would like to learn more about FAN-NWO, please visit our website at nwofood.ca or follow us on social media (@nwofood).
